2 Nephi 20:29 Textual Variants

The printer’s manuscript, the earliest extant reading, has Ramath instead of the King James Ramah. John A. Tvedtnes and Robert F. Smith have argued that the ath at the end of Ramath could represent the ancient feminine ending -at(h), which was later reduced to the vowel -ffla (with the final vowel orthographically represented by h) unless the -at(h) ending was followed by other morphological elements. Thus the original feminine ending -at(h) is retained in Ramathite (1 Chronicles 27:27), Ramathaim (1 Samuel 1:1), and compound names such as Ramath-lehi (Judges 15:17), Ramath-mizpeh (Joshua 13:26), and Ramath-negev (Joshua 19:8), of which the last was translated as “Ramath of the south” in the King James Bible. In other words, the Book of Mormon spelling Ramath could be said to represent the archaic form of the name, whereas the Masoretic Hebrew and King James Ramah represents the later form. For further discussion and additional examples, see John A. Tvedtnes, “The Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon”, FARMS preliminary report, 1984, page 84; Robert F. Smith, “Textual Criticism of the Book of Mormon”, Reexploring the Book of Mormon, edited by John W. Welch (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1992), page 77; and Robert F. Smith, Book of Mormon Critical Text, second edition (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1987), page 231.

Another possible explanation is based on the fact that orthographically Ramath would have been spelled with only a t at the end of the name and that t and h in the classical square script are very similar letters and could have been mixed up. This similarity, however, does not hold for the older archaic Hebrew script that would have been used on the plates of brass (assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that the characters on those plates were Hebrew rather than Egyptian); in the old Hebrew script (used prior to the Babylonian captivity), t and h were visually quite different.

But the most reasonable proposal, in my opinion, is that the th at the end of Ramath represents an error on the part of the scribe, Oliver Cowdery. First, the name Ramah does occur elsewhere in the Book of Mormon (in Ether 15:11), and there it is spelled correctly (albeit as the Jaredite name for the hill Cumorah). Second, a number of nearby names in this part of the Isaiah quotation end in th: namely, Hamath (2 Nephi 20:9 and 21:11), Aiath (2 Nephi 20:28), and Anathoth (2 Nephi 20:30). Hamath is especially similar to Ramath.

An important point to keep in mind here is that the spelling Ramath is the only name in the Isaiah quotations for which a variant spelling has been retained in the printed editions of the Book of Mormon. Yet this one spelling variant is simply the result of the 1830 typesetter neglecting to check his King James Bible and thus allowing Ramath into the text. Note further that here in 2 Nephi 20 he had recently set Hamath (in verse 9) and Aiath (in verse 28) and may have simply assumed that Ramath (in verse 29) was correct. If he had noticed that Ramath differed from the King James Ramah, he surely would have changed it as well.

For the more unfamiliar Isaiah names in 𝓟 (including Ramath), there is a visually similar name or word that seems to have served as the most probable exemplar for the misspelling:

Unlike the other analogical exemplars, Hamath would have been virtually unknown, but the recent occurrence of Hamath (with perhaps the help of the even nearer Aiath) may have primed Oliver Cowdery to write Ramath (and the 1830 compositor to set the same without checking his King James Bible). A similar effect occurred with the spelling of Rezin. The first three occurrences of Rezin were correctly spelled in 𝓟 (in 2 Nephi 17:1, 4, 8), but between the third and fourth occurrences of Rezin, the word razor occurs (in 2 Nephi 17:20), which resulted in the misspelling Razin for the very next occurrence of Rezin (in 2 Nephi 18:6). The critical text will therefore restore in 2 Nephi 20:29 the King James spelling, Ramah, just as the 1830 compositor did for all the other misspelled names in this long Isaiah quotation. (For each of the other cases, see the individual passage for a complete discussion of what may have caused the misspelling.)